Chuck shifted his shoulder blades on the floor of the cavern.
“As the ancient cultures grew and prospered across the region, the groups developed their own ceramic and pic-tographic styles,” he explained to Janelle. “In the south, the Mogollon perfected coiled brown-paste pottery. To the north and east, the Ancestral Puebloans used the clays in their area to create smooth-walled pottery featuring stark black geometric patterns on white-slipped backgrounds. Members of the Fremont culture north of here made coiled pottery, like the Mogollon culture, but in the gray color of the northern and central Utah soils.”
Chuck’s voice reverberated inside the cavern.
“All of the ancient cultures used rock walls as canvases for depicting their daily lives, but each did so in its own way. The members of the Mogollon culture in the arid south did far more rock-wall chipping than painting, much of it related to celestial observations. The Ancestral Puebloans, in their more verdant region watered by rivers and streams, developed an elaborate pictographic and petroglyphic style that featured anthropomorphic figures with broad shoulders shaped like inverted pyramids. The Ancestral Puebloan figures were topped by round heads and thick necks adorned with earrings, necklaces, and dangling pendants. The Fremont culture, meanwhile, developed a style as artistically advanced and distinctive as any style of art produced today. Fremont storytellers painted on rock walls with beautifully curved strokes and powerfully blunt lines—a style eerily similar to the cubist school of art made famous in the early 1900s by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The best known example of the Fremont style is the Great Gallery panel west of the Green River in Horseshoe Canyon. But if you ask me, I’d say the most striking example is the Four Faces panel, a line of human portraits painted in red on tan stone, with squared-off heads, heavily ornamented upper bodies, and haunting eyes gazing out across the remote desert landscape in Canyonlands National Park just a few miles from here.”
Chuck pointed at the cavern ceiling, close overhead.
“Until now, each of the ancient cultures’ pictographic styles has been found only in the areas inhabited by that particular society. But all three styles are evident here, indicating that supremely talented painters from each of the cultures worked in this cavern, in close collaboration, to create what we’re looking at. The most astonishing thing about this map is that it clearly shows the various ancient cultures thriving together across the Four Corners region. There’s some debatable archaeological evidence of the ancient peoples warring with one another at times, but this pictograph depicts only peaceful gatherings between members of the ancient Southwest societies.”
He aimed his finger down and to the right, at a depiction low on the cavern wall of humans in the distinct cultural styles of the Mogollon, Ancestral Puebloan, and Fremont dancing together on the bank of a stream.
“See there? That looks to me like some sort of ceremonial dance involving members from the different cultures gathered along the lower San Juan River near today’s border between Utah and Arizona.”
He pointed up and left, where members of the cultures exchanged baskets of goods on Cedar Mesa, south of the twin Bears Ears buttes.
“That’s another scene of peace.”
He ticked his finger to the left, at a depiction of a coordinated group hunt. In the painting, Fremonts walked in a line across the landscape, driving a herd of deer toward waiting Ancestral Puebloan and Mogollon archers in the remote Henry Mountains west of the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers.
“There, too—they’re even hunting together.”
“The detail, the quality,” Janelle said. “It’s like those caves in France, only more so.”
“You know about the Lascaux caves?”
“I read about them when I was studying up on you online after we first met.”
“You checked me out? You never told me that before.”
“I liked you. I wanted to know what I was getting myself into. I’d made a bad choice in men once, and I didn’t want to do it again.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Did you make a bad second choice?”
“I’m still deciding.”
Chuck smiled. “I’m not.” He took Janelle’s hand in his as they lay on the floor of the cavern. “You probably remember that only animals are painted on the walls of the Lascaux caves. Those paintings are beautifully rendered in full color, but they don’t include humans, which means they don’t convey much in the way of cultural information. Whereas, it’s the renderings of the human stories that make what’s in here so fascinating. Sanford thinks the quality of the work, combined with the depictions of all the ancient cultures coexisting across the region, will serve as a catalyst in the fight to return the national monuments to their original size.”
“That seems a bit of a stretch.”
“I tend to agree with you. But in today’s age of social media campaigns, he may be onto something. It was big news when the national monuments were reduced in size to almost nothing. Sanford wants to hit back at the boundary reductions before what was done fades from the public’s memory.”
Chuck shook his head, flickering the beam of his headlamp across the pictograph.
“This is what he wants to use. The original monument boundaries protected much of the area shown on this map—almost two million acres of desert wilderness around the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers. The modern tribes won the initial fight to create the monuments by setting aside conflicts and working peacefully together. This map shows that their ancestors worked together in peace, too. It demonstrates what today’s tribes long have maintained, that their ancestors a thousand years ago were real human beings whose activities and societal growth led directly to the cultural traditions of the Ute and Zuni and Hopi and Ute Mountain Ute and Navajo people of today—to the modern tribes’ peace-oriented powwows and rain ceremonies and healing rituals.”
“What, exactly, does Sanford want you to do for him?”
“The contract calls for me to photograph and measure the cavern interior, and then use the pictures and measurements to create a digitized representation of the pictograph. The representation will be presented to the legislature and shared via social media as part of the public release in January.”
“What made Sanford reach out to you? It’s not like you were friends with him.”
“We had run across each other at conferences a time or two, and he knew of the different discoveries I’ve made over the years. He also knew I’d done work involving all the ancient cultures represented here. I’ve led digs in Nine Mile Canyon, at the heart of Fremont culture in central Utah. I’ve conducted plenty of archaeological assessments over the years in Arizona and southern New Mexico, where the Mogollon people lived. I created a spatial map of the road system built by the Chacoan people, part of the Ancestral Puebloan culture, in northern New Mexico. And, of course, I’ve worked all sorts of contracts close to Durango, in and around Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado, the heartland of the Ancestral Puebloan people. Plus, Sanford knew that I haven’t been afraid to write up my reports based on what I find, even when my findings go against accepted trends.”
“My smart-guy husband,” Janelle said, squeezing Chuck’s hand.
Then she hoisted herself on an elbow and looked past him at the base of the cavern wall. She lifted her eyebrows, crinkling her forehead, obviously baffled.